Calvin also comments, “No one may presume to approach God and ask forgiveness, who is not pure and free from all resentment.” If we are withholding forgiveness from those who have truly and humbly sought our pardon, then we are ...Read More

Wisdom, the ability to put what we know into right action, seems to be in
short supply these days, but Paul assures us that we have the wisdom needed
to live for Christ as a gift of divine grace. The ...Read More

The passage for today tells us that discipline caused the Jews to repent of building altars to idols
and to return to Mount Zion, where they were to worship the Lord. The purpose of discipline is to
expose sin, to ...Read More

Repentance does not eliminate the struggle with sin and make us perfect immediately. But it does result in a marked change of thoughts, words, and deeds whereby we do not love our former lusts as we once did. If we ...Read More

Our sin is worthy of infinite punishment, but the good news of the gospel is that our Lord is infinitely merciful toward His people. He does not hold anything back when He forgives us, but He lavishes His grace upon ...Read More

One of the most important reasons we need godly friends is so that we can discern our guilt and experience the Lord’s forgiveness. Left to ourselves we will often rationalize our sins or quickly suppress guilt feelings, but others ...Read More

How do you view yourself? Do you acknowledge that you are a sinner who is no longer guilty because of Christ? Or are you weighed down by guilt for the sins that you have committed? If you have trusted in ...Read More

When was the last time you spent a day or part of a day in prayer and fasting, reading the psalms, going deep inside yourself before God and crying out to Him? We all need this from time to time ...Read More

We often long for things to be “just as they were before [fill in the blank]
happened” in our relationships with other people. If we are the main
offending party, however, we cannot realistically expect this to happen if
our ...Read More

God mercifully forgave David when he acknowledged his sin, but this does not mean his transgression had no consequences. David also worshiped the Lord even after these consequences were brought to pass (2 Sam. 12:15b–23), showing that He ...Read More

How is your personal walk with the Lord? Have you become calloused to the evils of sin manifest in you own life? Have you forgotten to spend time with Him? It is as we love Him more and more that ...Read More

Putting sins of the tongue to death requires more than just the cessation of
slander, as important as that is. More fundamentally, there needs to be a
mortification of the ungodly anger and malice that so easily well up within ...Read More

Are you afraid that you’ve committed the unpardonable sin? If you are concerned about it, you can
be assured that you haven’t committed it. Have you purposely called the work of the Holy Spirit
the work of the ...Read More